Saturday, May 30, 2009

Thinning out the collection

At the moment I'm going through my card collection, and taking a serious look at the cards sets I'm unlikely to complete. I've alredy sold a few on eBay and I have a few more on there now (These are 5 day listings and may well have closed by the time anyone reads this, but it might be worth clicking on the link anyway - if the listings they are closed, they will probably have been replaced with some others!)

No reason for doing this other than the fact that the cards are just sitting in albums and would probably do better if they were in the collection of someone who loved them more! I have a shortlist of cards that probably won't be sold - either because they have a sentimental value (a gift from a friend, say, or a favourite card), or because, in this buyers market, I'd be lucky to get more than the starting price (and I'm starting pretty much everything at 99p!)

In the meantime, life goes on, as does the podcast - Episode 18 of UK CardCast is online as I type and features interviews with Harris 'Ubiquitous' Toser, Marc de Groot and new soon-to-be 'Regular Contributor' Kris Kersey. Plus, I have already recorded the feature interview for Episode 19 (due out at the beginning of July - no names, no pack drill, but I REALLY had fun recording it and I think it should be extremely popular with listeners!

Back to my collection, and I have more-or-less completed my Thunderbirds The Movie set; I've been working on this for a little over a year and the last piece dropped into the binder a couple of months ago - for this set I consider a 'Master' to be all the base cards and chases, all the autographs, all the costume cards, all the promos, a wrapper, the box, at least one sketch and the two preview sets. I don't have a sell sheet for the set, so I may well keep looking for that, and I don't have a sketch example for all the artists who contributed to the set (currently looking for a Warren Martinek, a Joe Corroney, a Claire Ramsey, and possibly one of the painted cards (though I suspect they are out of my unfeasably low price range!) so I may well keep looking for cheap sketches as well, but otherwise it's done.
I also completed my autograph-less Sabrina The Teenage Witch set, thanks to a trade with a Jolly Nice NSU Card Talker, Greg Geert, who helped me to finish off the foil chase set.

Now I need to find some super cheap Star Trek boxes (the new movie set that is) and let The Hand pull the Simon Pegg autograph, then I can be happy for a while!





On the subject of Happy For A While, let me show you the most recent card that made me feel that way:It's Stewie from "Family Guy" as Irina Spalko from "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" drawn by Elaine Perna with Tony Perna and was a personal commission (made via the Scoundrel message board; I recently been picking up a collection of sketch cards showing the Spalko character (mainly because they have been cheap) and I now have quite a few - mostly from the official Topps sets, but two being PSC's (Personal Sketch Card) - one being the above, the other being one that Denise Vasquez did for me! (if you click in the 'Happy Fans' link on Denise's website you may well find a picture of me holding her card!)
If you want to see the rest of the "Spalko Collection", you'll find them here